In 1945, The Labour Party was elected to power and began the task of creating a comprehensive welfare state. As a socialist party, it nationalized various industries that it thought should be owned by the state.

Between 1946 and 1979, though there were changes of government, both the Labour Party (of the left and roughly equivalent to the Democrats) and the Conservative (aka the Tory) Party (of the right and roughly equivalent to the Republicans) maintained the welfare state and the nationalized industries.

Labour felt the nationalized industries (postal service, gas delivery - not to be confused with petroleum, electricity production, steel production, coal production, etc) were simply too important to the economy to be in private hands and the Conservatives talked of "natural monopolies". This amounted to the same thing. The state ran the show.

Whilst times were good in the 1960s everyone jollied along and the nation was at peace with itself. However, during the 1970s, strike actions led to a general malaise. The labour unions were thought to be too strong.

In 1979, the newly elected Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher began to privatize, ie de-nationalize, these various nationalized industries. This, created, internal competition within these industries and should have lead to increased production and better delivery. Privatization inevitably decreased the power of the labour unions as did government legislation.

This shift to the right was so pronounced that the Labour Party only regained power after it had a makeover and rebranded itself as "New" Labour under Tony Blair in 1997.

Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour managed things well enough to fend off the naturally managerial Conservative Party and carried on with the privatization agenda of Mrs Thatcher.

In the 2010, general election no overall victor emerged and the Conservative Party formed a coaltion goverment with the Liberal Democrats (a party that is so far behind the other two in support that the UK is traditionally said to have a two-party system). This coaltion government is a work in progress.

On foreign policy they were plotting WWIII just after WWII, didn't work out so well playing Germany and Russia against each other in WWII.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable